Tag Archives: poetry reviews

It’s been a little while since I published a review by Patricia Prime, so I was excited to receive this in my inbox today… Discovering a new haiku/haibun collection is always a joy so I hope that this review resonates deeply with many of you.

Snow on the Lake: haibun and haiku by Glenn G. Coats. Virginia. Pineola Publishing. (2013) Pb. 87 pp. ISBN: 978-615-799-117. The book is available at Amazon books for US$12. Reviewed by Patricia Prime

It is good to find a haibun poet’s efforts in print and Pineola have done a satisfactory piece of work in publishing Glenn G. Coats in this volume. We are told in the blurb that the book is a “memoir of another time, narratives about being a son, a brother, a friend.” Coats is also the editor of haibun for the online journal Haibun Today.

The book contains four sections. “Baptisms” presents a range of mostly autobiographical poems telling of Coats’ childhood; “Night Brings Peace” deals with personal encounters; “Believers offers reflections on the pleasures of a youthful life spent fishing, swimming and camping, and in “Remains of Myself” the author reflects on life through the eyes and words of his grandsons. Each section of haibun is divided by three pages of haiku, each containing four haiku and illustrated with a small drawing of a bird. These haiku complement the haibun. I quote one haiku from each section:

distant moon
one shirt holds the scent
of another home

late winter
I shake father’s watch
back to life

end of summer
rain pools
on a flip-flop

ripe strawberries
my grandson wonders
if I am old

Coats is always perceptive and often witty, and he writes with restraint and great care in his use and juxtaposition of prose and haiku in this book. More importantly, he is able to introduce an unusual perspective or unexpected viewpoint that amuses, compels thought, gives new insight, or occasionally startles or disturbs.

From the first haibun, “The House in Lawrence Street”, Coats has us eating out of his hand, wanting to read on, wondering why the child “can’t stand still, climbs up on everything in the house.” We don’t learn why the girl acts the way she does – it could be polio, but he asks why, then, is she able to “fly like a bird or jump like Tarzan.” In the lengthy haibun, “Baptisms”, he is perhaps laughing at himself remembering his cousin Jack as a child:

I see him the night before trout season opens. We are up all night talking; picking through my father’s ashtrays for butts long enough to smoke. In the morning Jack puts on a new fishing hat, and his boots and creel are also new.

But, later we see Jack as a man after he returns from the war in Vietnam:

I see me not much later reading Jack’s one letter from Vietnam, the one where he tells the truth, the horror, and the pain of it, but I am to promise to tell no one. He survives the war only to crash a motorcycle back in the states and for a time he is sucking food through a straw.

We don’t know whom to pity more, author or Jack. The simplicity of the narrative deceives. The spotlight Coats turns on himself and his cousin both amusing and poignant.

The haiku in this section are deceptively simple:

honk of a goose
no answer
to the loneliness

snow bound –
keeping the sock with a hole
one more day

If there is something cool about the descriptions in the first section, those in the second are warmer, yet there is an undercurrent of boldness. Coats sometimes throws his spotlight on the bizarre or unusual – the “evil eye” of Father Henry in “Beginners”, after he catches Coats and his young friend smoking cigars; or about the poet’s thought processes when he is recovering from a car accident (“Deer in the Headlights”) or the scene where three generations are on a fishing boat in “Harbor Lights”:

My son’s legs begin to wobble. We send him into the cabin for a Coke, but he doesn’t return. An old salt curses through the door, says some kid heaved near the kitchen. We lead him back on deck where he falls like a coat on a bench.

Coats’ imagery is highly visual; we could wish he would engage the other senses more often and directly, but we are glad of his use of dark and cold in the second section’s first haibun “In the Hours Before School”:

We fall down the road like raindrops from a tall tree. It is dark, no lights yet in the houses. Bicycles whir down the hills and fishing poles point like antennas from the handlebars. Canvas creels flap against our sides, Thick hip boots tug at waists. Fingers are numb from the cold.

In this section, there is some concession to other senses, notably in “Night Brings Peace”:

The year that I had wood shop, I made a broom holder out of poplar and a book shelf. The wood was green in color; easy to cut and sand.

It is no coincidence that throughout this section we feel closer to the poet, as he takes us through his youthful pranks, as in “Three Speeds on the Column”:

It is Saturday night and the band at Turntable is warming up. A few of us linger on the sidewalk. Our conversations are muffled and hard to understand as if we are talking underwater.

The haiku here are more considered with the poet’s personal stories:

crunch of gravel –
in one of his last breaths
my name

moonlit cove
my son walks a lure
across water

Description again comes to the fore in the third section. There is clever, controlled writing about his youthful adventures: shooting with bow and arrows or a shotgun, a neighbour’s boy who “never comes out”, a man strumming his guitar, a bullying teacher. In “Believers”, his father attends Mass under duress:

By the end of Mass, he is ready to bolt. Mother and I have to hold him back, make him wait as one aisle after another exits in turn. Outside, in the cool spring air, my father gives Father Henry a big smile and a handshake. “Thanks for a fine sermon,” he says. “How about those Phillies?”

The haiku which follow this section are primarily concerned with nature and human nature:

spring pastures
the farmer calls each cow
by name

It is in the final section that Coats comes closest to engaging our emotions. In the first haibun, “Dove Season”, after describing four boys painting a bicycle with cans of spray, he later discovers that the stolen bike belongs to him and the police are called:

The police know the boys and say they are always getting in trouble. Nothing they can do about the bike. Mama doesn’t keep a record of the serial number and the policemen say it is our word against theirs. No proof.

In these poems there are glimpses of childhood, youth and personal growth in which Coats opens the door a little of his own feelings. In “A Safe Distance From Home”, after describing purchasing a dog from the animal shelter, he writes:

A few hours later, after her first bath, her first walk around the yard, Angel slips away while I am talking on the phone. We call into the woods for an hour, a name the dog doesn’t recognize. Angel returns at dusk covered with mud and briars,

The dog has been ill-treated by a previous owner and Coates is speaking not only of his own feelings, but those of his grandson when, after the passage of a few weeks and “Angel has become Millie”, as

Conlyn lays his stick down beside the path. “I don’t need this stick anymore,” he says as he stoops down to pat Millie on the head.

In “The Snap of a Line”, after describing how his grandfather “bends over the bow”, he writes, “My father drifts in an aluminum boat across man-made lakes”, while his son “waits for the high waters of spring to settle down then crosses islands on the river to where catfish are breaking the surface in the dark.” Coats is speaking of a family event that has moved him greatly. The restraint of expression in this haibun is eloquent of one who knows the limitations of language to tell such things:

summer barbecue
the scent
of singed eyebrows

Coats has developed as an interesting haibun poet. His craftsmanship is impressive: language honed to be the instrument of intellect, wit and observation. Occasionally he lets us into that closely guarded inner sanctuary, as much by implication as by direct words.

Recently, I was invited to write a review of Penny Harter’s first eBook, One Bowl, published by UK Publisher, Snapshot Press. I had my original hesitations, which I explain in depth in the opening paragraph of the review, but after the first reading of the collection, I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary.

Snapshot Press have made their eBooks available for free on their website in both flash and pdf formats, and I cannot recommend highly enough that you visit the site and download a copy. With all the recent talk of beauty on this site, this is work that will make your heart ache and sing in equal measure.

Here is a section from the review:

Penny Harter is one of our finest living writers and teachers of Japanese forms. With four previous collections and numerous anthology appearances, it was a thrill to spend time with this new body of poems. Harter’s work has previously been described as “direct, lyrical, light-filled” (Catherine Doty) with the power to remind us that “the wheel of existence rolls onward, and we with it, no matter what comes” (Susan Tweit). These descriptions are true of the work in One Bowl.

Written following the passing of her husband, William J. Higginson, One Bowl is an exploration of life’s fragilities. The opening poem, “Estell Manor State Park,” leads us deep into a gray day, where “oaks arced full over trails that faded into green or snaked into a density of swamp and lichened trunks.” As we walk down that trail, a dead limb is tossed “full weight” at our feet and we are left to ask, what if . . . as our heartbeat quickens. It is this moment that opens the reader up to the thinness of life that resonates in Harter’s poems.

I was delighted when asked to write a comment for the jacket of John Parsons’ latest collection of haiku In a New Garden and, declaring this; I am equally pleased to review the work since I consider it to be one of the finest collections of haiku I have read. In his Preface to this fifth collection of haiku, Parsons writes, “This book is largely extracted from work over the past year, a time of upheaval and resettlement.” The book is divided into the seasons of the year; each season being prefaced by one of Parsons’ drawings.

The haiku are set out three to a page, in indented lines, with plenty of space around them. If you enjoy haiku, here is a volume full of delights and surprises. The strength, energy and compassion of Parsons’ haiku are impressive, and it is reader-friendly without ever being shallow. He brings a wealth of meticulous observation and personal experiences to his writing, through which we are better able to recognize ourselves and our surroundings. He invites the reader to share his vision and knowledge, and to discover with him, both human nature.

As I read and reflect on Parsons’ haiku, in all four sections of the seasonal year, I realize how the many layers of meaning of those title words – Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – are embedded in this collection, adding to its depth and the way the haiku work on the reader’s imagination.

The book opens with the section Spring. In the first haiku, we are with the poet in his “new garden” watching the unfolding snowdrops:

sense of belonging
snowdrops open
in a new garden

Parsons writes empathetically about new growth, flowers, bird’s eggs, the weather and the song of birds:

somewhere
lost in mist the robin
finds a song

this neatly sums up his interest in birds and their habitats. Moment after moment is described in meticulous detail, as we see in the following two haiku:

her book of symptoms
tulips writhe
against cut glass

*

in watery light
the whole meadow
webbed

By the closing poem of this section, the poet, fully aware of his own blessings, is able to give a “coin for the busker” and to hear him burst into song.

Parsons is a poet who has studied and practices drawing, printmaking, sculpture, songwriting and illustration and he has an instinctive understanding of line and form, and sensitivity to the music
of words. In the section Summer, for example, he writes

released lacewing
slow slant of glitter
lost in light

*

patch of moonlight
slips from her robe
the midnight room

each haiku having a fine feeling both of the musical and the “painterly” about them. Here we see “the moment under the moment”, the past that’s always there beneath the present.

Parsons seems to enjoy taking leaps to link ideas in unpredictable ways. In this section, for instance, he juxtaposes a dry beech mast to a baby toad, a stoat with a bow wave of rabbits, perennial leeks to random thoughts. Birds are clearly a passionate interest and fertile material for a number of haiku, among them a wren, a buzzard, gulls, pigeons, swallows and a goldfinch. As well as other fine haiku, including the beautiful

scent garden
for the blind roses feel ways
over the path

then there is his powerful

daughter returns
a goldfinch alights
on wizened marguerites

In section three Autumn, there are Parsons enthralling haiku about making love, All Hallow’s, the death of a friend, a hospital waiting room. The heart-wrenching

moonlight where she died
a ghost’s weight
on my shadow

Parsons demonstrates an unerring sense of voice in these autumnal poems in which he presents “rust-coloured chrysanths”, “shortening days”, “shriveled fronds”, but in all his work he subtly matches voice to mood and subject matter, as in the following haiku

beating heart
of silence a goldfinch
amongst cornflowers

where his minute observation is a compelling drive.

In the final section Winter, the haiku range across many subjects, from those about day-to-day things such as “lipstick smudges”, a “smart phone”, “new gloves”, to haiku about a value store, Christmas, snow and the lovely

tears on a greeting
where does she start
to wrap up a life

His desire to make a detailed study of the seasons seems to find its ultimate expression in the haiku

ice shards spread
in the oxbow’s curve cracks
of a woodman’s fire

Densely packed with vivid image after image, the moment-by-moment thoughts and minutiae of life
flow elegantly down the pages. There are so many fine haiku to indulge in – the memorable lines of

family heirloom
in the unfinished quilt
her last faltering stitch

and there are other beautiful, sensual and imagistic haiku too; the compassion and empathy of
“joints stiffen / every elbow of twisted hazel / a nodule of ice”, the indelible image of “just enough light / the robin’s breast / gives dead nettles life” and “loneliness / evening sun on the seat / never sat on”.

Whatever he writes about, Parsons always remains connected with the natural world and is sustained by it and even when he probes darker subjects, the sense of wonder it inspires shines through. He uses language powerfully to make us experience the world as he does, to hear birdsong, to feel the sun or the cold, to smell perfume or to sense the pain of stiff joints. His haiku shimmer with light, movement and colour, with sensual images that stay in the mind long after the book is closed.

Steven Carter’s work as a haiku and haibun poet has appeared regularly over the past year, and may therefore be familiar to readers both in the USA and elsewhere. The variety of haibun in The Hidden Berkeley is engaging. Over 30 haibun, a Prologue and Epilogue range across Carter’s life from the age of eighteen when he was a college freshman to his departure from Berkeley in 1967.

Carter’s collection of haibun, which vary in length from one to two pages, spans several years. The autobiographical sketches include vivid moments of encounters with the world, life-changing events, his love life and engagement with people that shaped him.

Shared worlds, physical, spiritual and cultural events inhabit this collection. Thus, in “From the Bottom of a Well”, a poem in memory of a “Foggy summer afternoon sitting on the rickety back porch”, the poet remembers the incidents of his Berkeley years and life with his mother and brother:

That Christmas we don’t buy a tree. My mom is too tired, I too depressed, my teen-age brother too indifferent, to clean up the house.

Reading the poem on the page, the words are transmitted through the imagination and the reader’s own memories into a silent cadence that in turn shape the images. It is very easy to identify with many of Carter’s experiences and his various attempts to come to terms with his feelings as he tries to find his place in the world.

The poet’s work is clearly informed by his physical terrain, a fact that shows itself through not only the subject matter – childhood, youth and love are recurring themes – but frequently in the way the haibun appear on the page, inhabiting space in which the haiku shine through as a kind of coda. The joining of the prose and haiku works well in most of the haibun. Carter’s characteristic style being story followed by one haiku. The following haibun, “Fall ‘63” is quoted in full:

To my impoverished and callow twenty-year old sensibility, Marcia, the willowy teen-ager next door on Hearst, is like water on a table-top; fun your finger through it and it leaves no trace of where it was. Every night, at the agreed-upon time, she flashes her bedroom light twice and, as I look on from my kitchen window, bares her beautiful breasts to me.

my Plato falls open –
Love
is a beggar

These are haibun which reward concentrated reading, and the cumulative effect is to offer deep insight into the poet’s life. Carter is attentive, his eye and ear are intensely tuned, so that story and haiku are partners. Girlfriends, funerals, and his grandmother: the images are vivid. Elsewhere it is friends, his brother, and a policeman that captures our attention. In “Far Side” he is “Returning to Berkeley from a carefree year in the Young People’s Republic of San Diego.” Alone, he experiences a bout of neurasthenia and rolls around in bed in pain, before taking the bus too his evening’s shift at the library. This poem is like a mark of the young man’s determination and fortitude against all odds. In “Rain” the two brothers are living with their grandmother when the repossession man comes to remove their TV. “’Sorry,’ the repossession man shrugs, turning off Walter Cronkite and unplugging the TV, ‘just doing my job.’”

One of Carter’s best haibun is “Mt Everest of kegs”, in which the two brothers fight. Their mother despairs of them and comes to the conclusion that there is no hope for either of them:

Discouraged with the lifestyles of both her sons, but especially of Allan, my mother confided in me shortly before her death that the best my brother could hope for was a career in the army.

In 1989 he was appointed to the Solana County Municipal Court Bench by the governor of California.

what might’ve been
the landlord’s
young Norwegian wife

The sense of the personal voice that rings with an awareness of life’s complexities and sadness, a world of ambiguities and sheer joy is perfectly heard in Carter’s haibun. His voice sings of individualism in both form and content and it welcomes the reader in a manner that is both traditional in the use of image and form and new in its fresh magnanimity. In “Elevator out of service” the year is 1965, the poet has moved to the Berkeley Hotel in order to bring up his grades –

but also to forget what had happened in August, when Kim, the San Diego girl I wanted to marry, pulled the plug on our relationship. Drowning my sorrows in schoolwork, I figured, would kill two birds with one stone. I was half-right . . .

What is evident from this volume is how often Carter’s haibun concentrate on the big issues of existence: life and death, love and hope. These poems are strongly influenced by the particular timbre of the language, formed by the contours of the landscape and the life-rhythm of modern-day America. That said, they are crowded with impressions of light and darkness, summer and winter months: an existential searching for identity and context. The intensity of many of these haibun grows out of their truth, their reality. Moments are preserved, and the trigger of memory is released. Place, people and events weave a dance through haibun that evoke a beauty and power, treading a path through a life that is full of sadness, joy, wonderment and hope.

The overall attraction in these haibun is Carter’s trust in his reader to make sense of the disparate narrations he embarks on, the little chunks of history and geography in many of his haibun, and after a while one arrives at a familiarity with the man writing and the circumstances which permit him to record important events in his life. As the haibun “Morning Twilight” indicates Carter succeeds more often than not in holding our attention when he shows us into a room a writer’s mind inhabits:

When I was young, like all kids I expected adults to walk the straight and narrow and the world to be a more or less place. Then, one by one, my idols crumbled, as they must: my grandmother’s jolly grocer on the corner of Addison and Grant in Berkeley, who always sat me on the counter and sang a song in Italian, went to jail for tax evasion; the director of one of my foster homes, whom I’d begun to consider a second mother, went to jail for embezzlement; my grandmother herself, it turns out, played the ponies and financed her gambling habit by stealing from my step-grandfather; and so on. These revelations were shattering once upon a time, but now I accept them, having learned in late middle age that forgiveness at a distance is a privilege, if not a luxury.

moonset &
the terror of
innocence

The Hidden Berkeley is replete with images, ideas and stories of the making of a man – of ordering and disrupting order, of the complex relationships between families, friends, colleagues, as well as with the placement of each within the history of one man. Throughout the book Carter works with a multiplicity of stories and draws the reader into associative ideas, bringing the reader to an ample understanding of the complex historical, cultural and philosophical foundations of his life. What might be poetic sketches from life becomes another field of composition: life as an artwork. The poet’s life compressed into this book unfolds ideas both minute and complex. The collection contains fine examples of individual haibun and it also forms a cohesive whole as an autobiography. Carter presents an interesting way for haibun to be expanded from travel writing, or journal writing to a diary of awakening maturity.

It’s always a pleasure to post one of Patricia Prime’s reviews, but tonight, the pleasure is even greater, as the review is of a collection by one of our great ambassadors for Japanese forms, Beverley George. If you are not familiar with Beverley’s work, this is a real treat.

Wind through the Wheatfields is a collection of tanka responses and tan renga featuring the work of Beverley George with many of the poets with whom she says in her Preface, she has “shared workshops; conferences, meetings; readings; a loved book; a point of view.” The poets come from several countries: Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A., France and South Africa. The book is beautifully illustrated by Pim Sarti and has been designed by Matthew George.

In this volume we see the way in which the challenge facing the contemporary poet writing tanka responses and tan renga forms, that date back to the Japanese Nara and Heian Periods, are currently manifesting themselves. How does one write tanka responses that are still recognizable as such without merely repeating what has already been done by others? And how do you write a tanka response that attempts to address wider issues? In these forms, the poets cover many subjects, from science fiction to beach softball.

The achievement and success of these now very well-known forms, written in many languages world-wide, attract a good following. Many people are drawn to them as literary exercises, a challenge in conciseness, while others may enjoy the companionship of writing in tandem. The humility and the ambitions are finely balanced in the poems collected here.

And the achievements are considerable. In the first tanka response, between André Surridge and Beverley George, “Refrain”, George summons us all to the circle of friendship with the tanka:

half-circle of old friendsaround the mallee-root fireyou reach for somethingowned since childhoodread aloud ‘the hums of Pooh’

It is often, as in the responses between Beverley George and David Terelinck, in “Unseen Threads”, a matter of cadences:

she tries to beat
a computer game score
before an eye operationgrandma’s stories flickerin fake log-fire flames

In the way images carry fleeting glimpses of meaning, the poem reveals the poets’ concerns with family. There are the elusive images of “mother’s honey suckle”, ”grandma’s stories”, “her first-born child’s / nervous win” and the “antique chair” which we might imagine once belonged to a loved one.

“Sliding into Silence” a tan renga between Beverley George and Julie Thorndyke focuses on a

winter evening
a rim of lamplight
on worn books he lays down gold rimmed specshums to dispel the quiet

While in “Trade Winds” the two poets are in their homes where the builders are at work:

she barks orderswants the whole thingfinished by Christmas
the builder clears his throat
stares at the horizon

Kathy Kituai and Beverley George take us on a trip to Scotland in their tanka response “Taking Hold: Letters Home from Scotland”:

Passing Places
on one vehicle roads
how welcome,
peak after lonely peak,
to pull over and wave

KK

“An Owl in the Olive”, a tan renga between Beverley George and Kirsty Karkow includes references to science fiction, drawings in a Lascaux cave, bush fires, volcanoes and much more:

red-hot lavasizzles through darknessto a cold sea
a watch-dog chained
under Pompeii’s cinders

winter ebb-tide
a shapeless bundle
in the dune grasswas baby Moses’ crylike that of passing gulls?

In “Bathers”, Beverley George and Meredith Ferris recollect motherhood in the 1940s and 1970s:

kitchen table
and a bowl of soapy water
Mum dressing me
for Sunday School
in clothes she’s proud she sewed

BG

holiday houseshe bathes my baby brotherin the laundry tubperched on a stoolI lean into his laughter

MF

The poem successfully mixes memories of the poets’ own childhoods, which are significantly different from those of contemporary children.

Beverley George returns to childhood in the tanka response with M. L. Grace, “Hollyhocks and Smocking”. The poets remember a “back-yard dairy”, “aunts / in cross-stitch aprons”, “crochet patterns” and “three generations / in the valley”. While Owen Bullock’s easy comedic voice is brought into play in his and Beverley’s “Rosemary Hard-Pruned”, where Bullock’s themes are drawn from life and from Cornwall where he was born:

grandpa’s shed . . .nuts and bolts in jam jarssorted for sizebundles of lavenderstrung from the rafters

BG

Granfer drew cartoons
when he got sick
with diabetes
& Gran went to Chapel
to listen to the Preacher

OB

Browsing, exploring, appreciating, finding inspiration, or simply enjoying the expression of our common humanity in such a rich variety of writing is a delight. For me, this collection proves most successful when the poets voyage into the past. That these poets are masters of the intellect, of words, of the tanka response and tan renga forms seems indisputable.

I recently had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Steven Carter’s latest haiku/haibun collection, Pillars of Fire. Excitingly, this review is now online and available to read. Here’s a section from the review:

Opening poem “Errand” is a fine example of Carter’s taut, incisive prose. Like many of the haibun in this collection, the subject matter is unsettling. “Errand” invites the reader to enter a moment between son and father-in-law, a man described by Carter as “blunt and crude.” In this moment, the son is asked to help drown a litter of kittens, a job he finds no joy in, but does not refuse, subtly illustrating the power imbalance in the relationship. As the moment unfolds, the son is handed a burlap sack to collect the kittens and then after a silent drive to the reservoir, the father-in-law asks, “Want to do it?” And in these four words, the tension of the poem is masterfully brought to a crescendo. The younger man, seeing this as a test, a strange initiation, tosses the bag “dead centre in the reservoir” and watches it disappear . . . only to turn and see his father-in-law, “leaning on the flat-bed, back turned, pretending to look assiduously into the distance.”

The heat has finally dissipated and the last night of spring has opened in all of its glory… the perfect night for reading and contemplating haiku and its related forms. As you all know, Patricia Prime is one of my favourite reviewers, so it is again, my pleasure to be posting this recent review.

James Norton worked in the field of therapeutic horticulture and teaches within the Shambala Buddhist community. He has been an editor and is a founder member of Haiku Ireland and the Redthread Haiku Sangha. The Fragrance of Dust is his second collection of haiku and haibun.

Norton is a thinker, a lover of the lyric line, so it is that certain words can be applied to his writing: modest, assured, precise and finished. This is a poet who likes structure. His collection is subdivided into nine sections, and inside the sections there are haiku, poems and haibun.

The Fragrance of Dust invites its readers in with “Owl House Days”: the section opening with the haiku

She walks her horses
up the long hill, three heads
bowed to the rain

The haiku is followed by a poem and a rensaku. “Three Abandonments” contains three poems, while “Doublin’ Back” opens with four haiku which lead on to three haibun, several haiku, three more haibun, three haiku and two more haibun. The haibun feature vivid vignettes from the poet’s Irish background – a homage to Yeats and Joyce, for example, in this excerpt from “Sandscript”:

Baby William Butler Yeats was wheeled in a carriage through these streets. Young Stephen Dedalus strode into eternity along this strand. There Bloom ever wanders, ogles Gertie while his Molly plays. Which is real, who imagines?

Herons
mirrored in sky-pools
ruffled, rippled

Hand in hand
two tiny figures
cross immensity

Then there’s the Sunday morning cycle ride in “Between Bridges” with its evocation of Dublin:

A Sunday morning in early July after a night of warm rain, clouds promising more, the air tumescent with scents. At Lansdowne Bridge on impulse cycle upstream along the Dodder – An Dothra, the Flood – towards Ball’s Bridge.

The contrast between the haibun is a delight, while well-placed detail evokes a world that is surely passing, along with the donkey rides that are mentioned in “Knockree”:

City children holidaying. There am I in sepia, seated on a donkey, its ears back, not pleased. No more I am myself, braving it, but her arm around me and she smiling. Happy then.

The next section, “Westerlies”, is composed of a haiku sequence, individual haiku and seven poems. The poems serve to illustrate another facet of Norton’s writing: his tendency for lyric phrases and cadences. Here we have the grace of lines and stanzas, the imagery and intensity of diction, as we see, for example, in the final verse from “At Thoor Ballylee”:

Out back a damson:
fruiting stone.
The sounding water rushes on.

In “Another Country”, two haibun are dedicated to friends: the first, “Welsh Rarebit”, to the eminent haibun poet, Ken Jones, and his wife Norah, and the second, “One for the Slate”, to Jane and Mickie. “Welsh Rarebit” is a lovely example of the poet’s recollection of a visit to Jones and his wife in Cym Rheidol. It is a vignette of the poet’s love of history and nature, reinforced by perfect precision, as we see in this final paragraph and following haiku:

Something shifts. The truth of being as it is. Place and moment gather into completeness. We limp back to Plas Plwca as night falls.

His thin-ness –
two skeletons embrace
departing

Three haibun and several individual haiku are grouped under the heading “Aragonese”. The first of these, “Romerias 1, 2 & 3” is particularly good. It focuses on a visit overseas to see a sculptor friend. The haibun is constructed in beautiful shapes, sound and tone: here is the haiku and opening paragraph from the first section with its frustration at airport holdups brilliantly evoked:

night sounds
hearing silence in each creak
and fading footfall

Bedlam at the airport. It seems we all want to leave. Security can’t cope. I miss the flight, and ring to say no go. Then I’m on standby. Six hours to explore Departures.

In the second haibun, “A Tear of the Sun”, the poet is in a Spanish supermarket “stocking up for a week of mountain solitude, in flight from Christmas jingles.” And in the third haibun, “Ruta Orwell”, he writes about George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War. I quote the last paragraph and haiku:

The trenches and sandbagged redoubts are reconstructions but the scouring wind and the sense of melancholy in these hills is real.

Monegros
the heroic struggle against
boredom and lice

“Warrior Cries” contains one haibun, “Leaf-bursts”, and three poems. “Leaf-bursts” takes us to Poland, where

Apartments from the soviet era squat beside crumbling brick barns, greying timber houses. Implements in yards, each eloquent in its own, the broken and the useful, in rain and sunlight, idleness and labour, just as they are. Black soil of vegetable plots, turned and ready.

the sick catnow
into ginger fur
licks warm sun

The section entitled “Laborare est” contains three haibun and several individual haiku. The first haibun, “Yeh Go I” focusses on a “slow boy” and to his delight in racing round a go-kart tract:

Then to the figure-8 go-kart track. Around and around he goes at a sedate pace while I watch. Tiring of it, I go back to the van for a snooze, leaving the attendant to keep watch.

The next haibun, “Seedling”, is bravely honest in its portrayal of a marginal figure:

See him raking leaves on a winter’s day, bent to his task, hoodie shadowing his face, he’s a diminutive serf locked in the margins of a Book of Hours. See his absorbed expression listening to vintage reggae – he’s burnin’ Babylon.

While the last haibun, “Something in the Air”, is a delightful portrait of a workman: his day done, he admires his work:

Job done, he pauses in the roadway, looks about expressionless. The blower’s nozzle swinging idly across the detritus of chipping randomly patterns the underlying surface. He squeezes the throttle gently. Shapes appear and dissolve. Smiles.

just a few raindrops
enough to release it
the fragrance of dust

Here are three haiku from the section:

The little larch
still wearing its name-tag
it too turns brown

Lengthening
a snail’s shadow
draws out the sun

April hail –
two robins at a pear-bud
freeze in mid-flight

The final section, “In an Acorn Cup”, contains eight poems and six pages of haiku. In “To a Fallen Swallow”, a nature piece which has much to commend it, Norton’s cadences seem very appropriate to the theme. Here is the first verse:

Sweeping round the office park
I find the little clochan
fallen from the eaves, its nest
dissolved to mud and straw by winter rain.

That’s a superb image – effective and memorable. In another poem, “What the Shed-boy Said”, the poem records a boy’s joy at not having to live in a bricks and mortar house, but in a cabin surrounded by natural sights and sounds:

Last night I heard the vixen scream;
the dogs went wild and bayed a while.
And so I thought – yeh,
blest that in a cabin dwell

One cannot do justice to this collection in a review as it is jam-packed with material. The mapping of personalities and places is integral to the poet’s vision and the confessional passages of the book are complemented well by his experiments with form. At his best, Norton blends the complex tradition of Japanese verse forms and lyric poetry into something wholly his own. His poems are both original and informed by the tradition he loves. They are also visually and aurally satisfying. This is a book that celebrates life, a book for which many readers should make time.